gm2263

IMPORTANT NOTICE – 14 November -2006

The content of this article has originally appeared in Skyscrapercity in this address (click). I re-post it here for archival purposes in the hope that it will reach a wider audience, thus broadening the scope and appeal of the idea of building tall in the Athens greater area. .

The article is now included in http://www.e-rooster.gr, following a kind invitation by the site's administrators. E-Rooster is a Hellenic website dedicated to liberal and free thinking.

Click HERE to access the same article as is, titled "ALL OUT FOR A TALL ATHENS".
Also available in http://www.e-rooster.gr/06/2005/186.

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Athens Skyscrapers and Highrises: The Definitive Thread – V. 2.0 – The Reload

Preface to V 2.0 for the Skyscraperlife forumers

This text has originally been published in the Skyscrapercity - Euroforums section in May 2005. Since then, many things happened, some of them pleasant, some others, not. The pleasant things relate to the announcement of a proposal by the architect Mr Anastasakis of a "multiscraper", that is, a complex consisting of three (not two as mistakenly written in the press) skyscraper wings of 200, 160 and 120m tall respectively. The second, is the vision for a multi-purpose complex in Drapetsona, close to Piraeus at the area of the old fertilizers factory (Λιπάσματα) that includes a 16-20 storey tower (I have been unable to determine the exact number of floors from the rendering but that's about it). The third is the publication of an end-year group dissertation from three students of the University of Thessaloniki, about a proposal for three skyscrapers of a height of 165m for the area of Lahanokipoi to the west of Thessaloniki. Needless to say that their proposal has been endorsed by the local architectural community and thus found its way to the press, allowing our Thessalonicean friends a heart-thrilling announcement.

Also, many-many people have read the text that follows which the old dogs here probably know by heart, yet many more discover it day by day. Despite an anticipated fierce reaction on the part of the usual negativists, most people and especially, members of the Hellenic Architecture Community that are working in the field, point out the idea of building tall with a view to create emblematic structures in an otherwise homogeneous urban ocean which at ground level is charming but in parts not consistent with the functional demands of a metropolitan area of close to 5 million inhabitants. So, to my utter surprise, since I have been studying tall buildings in Greece for close to thirty years, (and occasionally abroad, thanks to my cousins living in NY ), lately we started having serious discussions regarding the need for building tall in selected places in Athens.

Of course things are not easy. Some members of the academic community seemed to not have taken good notice of this need, as indicated in some of their electronic (and printed) scripts. I would advise them to reconsider. Up to a few days ago, I hadn't realized how many people would be positively inclined to building tall in Athens, to liaising the old and the new, to redefining what this city stands for. Yet, on a number of occasions, I met many people that told me they have read my (our) posts and are in support of our ideas, regardless of them not taking the time to become members and post their own views (after all, life is difficult and most people have other things in their minds).

Next thing I would like to do though is to go public. The original post is closing to a number of 16,000 views at the time of this writing. Its mirror sites in some other discussion forums also indicate numbers in the area of thousands. But even this, it is not enough. Tall Athens cannot wait for all people's problems to be resolved or for when the negativists will have an epiphany and realize the damage they did and still do to my city with their miserable attitude. We are not talking about "manhattanising" Athens. We are also not talking about sinking this city in a mediocre 7-storey concrete soup either, while wondering why all free spaces are taken to satisfy the ever-increasing needs of its citizens. I would like to appear on the television, to see and be seen and to face all those decide for us without us, in a vacuum of reasoning and logic.

What you are about to see is past. Are you ready to go into the future? Then follow me on a journey for sustained greatness in a city that was great, is great and is about to become even greater and be elevated to bigger heights.

Our Motto:


ALL OUT FOR A TALL ATHENS



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Introduction: Read while pictures load ( You guessed it– this is the mother of all threads!!! )

Several years after my first HUGE thread on Athens skyscrapers titled "Athens Skyscrapers and Modern Architecture" in the old SSC, and after a whole new generation of Greek forumers have joined all the relevant forums, I believe the time has come for an update and a detailed account about the peculiar situation pertaining to the existence of tall buildings in Athens (and Greece), the misunderstandings, as well the chances of the particular issue to be raised in the near future. All that from the only Greek editor in http://www.skyscrapers.com, now also known as http://www.emporis.com, the leading authority in skyscrapers and building information worldwide.

So here it is, a thread which not only presents pictures of Athenian tall buildings (well, nothing special but they are still standing), but also includes in my view valuable information of not only the existing ones, but also FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER the never-beens, the could have- beens – and one was demolished, including a full bunch of exclusive images capturing the full sequence of the actual 17-storey building tumbling down and falling to pieces after a series of controlled explosions. Also, the images portfolio of this thread includes excusive pictures of blueprints and models of planned "real" skyscrapers and 20-30+storey-tall towers some 30-35 years ago, projects that for whatever reason have never been realised and were buried under a negativist propaganda which turned skyscrapers into hate symbols and imminent apocalyptic evils as if the Greek construction firms -if permitted- would rush to build 300m-tall towers next to the Acropolis. And all that presented FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE WEB EVER since nobody else to date cared or even dared to bring this discussion into full light.

Preparing this information in presentable form was a huge task that involved the scanning and editing of many pictures captured from various sources that I had stored in my archives, including video recordings from TV news reports. In addition, all the pictures presented here, especially the old ones that you might have seen in skyscrapers.com of other previous threads, have been re-mastered and reedited specifically for this thread. In some cases where for a number of treasons it was not possible to collect new material, I re-mastered the original source files including pics from Kodak picture disks, etc, so, whatever material you will see is practically new in terms of source origin in order for the pics to comply with the latest standards in terms of picture quality. Also, given the fact that the vast majority of the viewers will use a 1024x728 screen resolution I resized the pics to a maximum of 800x pixels horizontal dimension. Additionally, all of them have been compressed to downloadable sizes in order to facilitate low bandwidth users although my I reckon that you will have to fight red "x" with many manual attempts, especially if you have anything below 64K ISDN (like me). However, be aware that all the pictures presented here have been checked for downloadability and the links work fine. In case you see a red cross, you can right-click your mouse on it and then left-click on the choice"show picture". It will work and believe me, it is worth the way.

Now, to facilitate your reading for those interested, you can copy and paste this text and pics immediately after download into an MS Word document for future reference if you so wish. It's practical and you can do it if you want to disseminate the information here to other interested parties.

Finally, I would like to kindly ask participants to keep their replies civil, as it originally took me ages (well… weeks) to prepare all this, and this is a skyscrapers and constructions forum first and foremost. I know that Athens doesn't have any real skyscrapers, so any comparison between cities with the aim to humiliate or edify Athens to unreal limits may be pointless here. As you will see, the choice about not to build skyscrapers was from a point in time, a political decision, NOT related by any means with the capacity of the technical construction firms of this country which have successfully undergone the test of the Olympic Games, given the fact that Greece is the smallest country to have organised them in the history of the modern games ever.

With all that, I let you enjoy (hopefully) what follows and especially for the young Greeks that started recently flooding this forum to get a different perspective about the built environment that they live in.

ALL OUT FOR A TALL ATHENS

Gregory Maloucos,
Editor for Athens and Greece,
http://www.emporis.com, http://www.skyscrapers.com


2. The Blasphemy that Never Was: Setting the Stage

What most people know about Athens can be summarised in pictures that look like this, where the all-times classic 150 –tall rock of the Athens Acropolis is in the centre of a sea of lowrise concrete blocks between 3 to 10- storey buildings:

-The Acropolis seen from Lycabettus Hill (height: 270m) looking south:


…some postcards from the same spot may also offer a wider angle which looks like this:



The truth is that when many-many years ago the possibility of tall buildings in Athens met the reservations of those believing that tall buildings would spoil the view of the existing Athenian hills. We can see a distant view of three of them including the Lycabettus hill, the Acropolis and the Philopappos hill, taken from one of the best observation spots not much known, the Prifitis Ilias in Piraeus (with a very large zoom: That's one of the reasons that I like my camera ).



But… let's have a closer look at this picture. Now, if I proceed in magnifying a bit more what do I see? Just look at the following couple of pictures for the ultimate blasphemy, the ultimate nightmare of the city's planners to date as well as the architectural community can be seen here thanks to the long distance and the tricky games of the lenses: Antiquities and highrises side by side!!!! Exclusively for you brought by the official highrise freak of this country .





Also, remember the views of the Acropolis from Lycabettus hill shown above? These are pretty famous all over the world. However, if the same photographers made an attempt to take a picture to the north instead of the south of the hill, that's the picture that they would take:



Quite different from what we are used to see in Athens isn't it?

Also, here is the view one may see from a particular spot on the mountain of Penteli, clearly indicating that NOT all of Athens is THAT flat. This is one of the views of this city that I like most, since I first saw it some 30years ago, while my father took the family to eat in one of the many taverns still existing in Penteli. It was because of this view and some others that the idea of tall buildings was stuck in my mind.




But what happened to these buildings that are clearly above the stereotypical 8-storey limit, which formally or unofficially seems to have been imposed on this city? Who built them? Why are there never mentioned or depicted in city guides? When where they built? Will there be any new tall buildings in Athens in their future?

These are the questions we will try to answer with this thread. But let's go through some history first…


2. Historical Perspective

Following a heroic yet futile struggle against the axis forces which was succeeded by a prolonged period of occupation (1941-1944) and a bloody civil war, Greece found itself in real pain at the end of the 1940's. Athough Athens was not bombed by the Nazi and the fascists, leaving most of the city in tact because of itsantiquities, the civil war that followed immediately after liberation between the national pro-western government and army on the one side and the pro-communist rebels (1944-1949) on the other, Athens was left with many scars, both externally as well as internally, in what one might call "the collective unconscious" of its citizens. At that time, (1949-50) Athens was the capital of a country with a large number of war casualties (over than 500,000) and a destroyed infrastructure. The city itself had a population of slightly above one million and many parts of it were in ruins albeit not as much as other European cities which have been carpet-bombed or otherwise completely devastated during the war. Still in parts, the situation was quite reminiscent of the tragic events that took place at that time.

During the early reconstruction period, the only real concern for the city planners was to accommodate the thousands of immigrants fleeing from the countryside into Athens trying to escape the misery that was awaiting them in the barren war-torn countryside. I will not go into detail, but I will make a passing reference to a number of master plans that were considered from 1945 to 1949 when a significant figure, Konstantine Doxiadis the then minister of public works, among others, using the generous funds of the so-called "Marshall Plan" originated by the US as part of their aid to post-war Europe in his effort to put an order to the chaos and to accommodate the thousands of incoming refugees from the rural areas, an effort with significant but alas, still quite limited results.

At that time, the size and sheer volume of building constructions was not that large partly because of the reason that indeed, there didn't seem to be such a need yet. Indicatively, my parents were telling me about the "Giannaros Skyscraper" (Ο ουρανοξύστης του "Γιάνναρου" ) referring to the 7-storey building on the corner of Syntagma Square (I think it's Othonos Street) and Philellinon Street in central Athens as an example of tallness in these early years.

However, even as early as the beginning of the 1950's, the government planners have started to consider the allowance for bigger structures as they observed that (quite reasonably) the city had already started to grow exponentially, developing needs that could not be satisfied by the medium and functionally inadequate size of the existing buildings at that time, be it governmental, residential or even commercial.

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We are the citizens, the urbanomancers, the ones that can infuse megapolisomancy into this inertia, the urbanauts of the new world, the spirited ones who can fly across space and time, the transformers of worlds, the episcopes of change. We can do it.
ALL OUT FOR A TALL ATHENS